DrGvago

Please read my User Page page intro prior to contacting me.

It provides pertinent information about me and my Wikipedia knowledge, experience, and interests which may address your concerns. DrGvago (talk) 11:38, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

Admin help request for systemic spam

I have noticed quite a bit of systemic reference/external link spam for the domain planetware.com on a number of pages. On some of them they are using archive.org to mask the spam, others it is directly to their website. Some examples:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamaica#cite_note-kingston-101 <- archive.org link
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palencia <- direct external link "Checklist of notable sights in Palencia with links"
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leeds#cite_note-8 <- archive.org link
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piraeus#cite_note-29 <- archive.org link

As you can see when looking at these, the cite reference name takes different forms. "www.planetware.com", "Planet Ware Travel Guide", "Planet Aware" etc. These are just some examples and I believe there are many more per this search: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=planetware.com&go=Go&ns0=1 I am not sure how to proceed and I believe this may need admin attention to the accounts that may be involved or a different approach vs me attempting to remove spam, and I am not sure how to find the accounts to report them to the admin spam noticeboard which requests usernames. Also, in the interest of disclosure, please see my user page re: some small potential COI as I do have clients (who don't spam nor are on wiki) in the travel industry. Thank you. DrGvago (talk) 11:11, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

To add to this, it is not limited to English Wikipedia. Ex:

• https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=planetware.com&go=Go&ns0=1
• https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=planetware.com&go=Go&ns0=1&ns100=1&ns104=1

Thank you. DrGvago (talk) 11:15, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

• DrGvago please file a report at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Spam - srroll down that page a little, and you will see "Click Here to start a new report" . Then give them everything you can on this. Thank you. — Maile (talk) 20:10, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

• Maile66 thank you for the guidance. DrGvago (talk) 21:02, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

Poking COIBot

I have added you to the settings for that capability, it may be some time before the bot however refreshes its settings (it does not read it every second) so it may not have immediate effect, if it doesn't work after a day or so there is an issue). There are sets of pages that should generate reports automatically (WT:WPSPAM being one, blacklist pages do the same) but with the size of the feed sometimes the bot disconnects and misses edits (it is in my buglist). Thanks for the report! --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 11:34, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

Forgot to say, the reports go into a queue, and these have lower priority than others. It may sometimes be delayed if there are other domains having priority.

Your userpage makes an interesting read, you say that Wikipedia has low SEO value. I presume due to the use of the nofollow? However, we do see spammers (which is not necessarily the same as SEO) coming here with the complaint that their link is blacklisted and they need the incoming traffic from Wikipedia. Wikipedia being a highly visible page makes it valuable to be linked there so people will find you and visit your site (this goes more extreme for the pay-per-click or pay-per-view websites, where the incoming traffic is more important). --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 11:42, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

As a short summary; wiki links do have some value but you aren't going to rank a page based on wiki links. It takes many more reputable links to do so, and the time and effort it goes to maintain that a link would stay on wiki is a lot. Once the link is removed, as it often is for spam, there is no lasting value. However you do bring up the point that there can be some traffic from wiki as a source but in my experience that has been a very small portion of traffic (if any) for the sites I have been involved with, since the objectives of getting the traffic directly from the search engines is more important, from a pure SEO perspective. So to summarize it, I'd rather a site ranks better than a wiki article and get the traffic from there vs from a wiki article link, especially if it's buried in the references.

Thanks for the COIbot add. I am interested to see how that works. DrGvago (talk) 12:35, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

Minor mistake

Hey there! I noticed that you recently marked an edit as minor that may not have been. "Minor edit" has a specific definition on Wikipedia—it refers only to superficial edits that could never be the subject of a dispute, such as typo corrections or reverting obvious vandalism. Any edit that changes the meaning of an article is not a minor edit, even if it only concerns a single word. Also, you accidentally put a comma inside the link to WordPress, which I have fixed. That doesn't mean I disagree with your edit! It contextualized his actions as within the open-source movement, something known as the greatest skill of a historian. Aaron Liu (talk) 00:24, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the clarification! DrGvago (talk) 00:34, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

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